Here's another view of the Rock River a mile or so downstream from that park, downstream of the dam where it's all been channelized. A lone duck was watching the water flow past.

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We drove up US 51 from Beloit to Janesville and passed the Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport along the way. They had a little private jet on a stick, which is a pretty typical thing for an airport to do. Googling the plane-on-a-stick's registration number tells me this is a Hawker 700A that was flown for 38 years by a private charter company called SC Aviation. Before getting stuck, this very plane carried people like Margaret Thatcher, Steven Tyler (of the rock band Aerosmith), and former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

We were in Janesville, Wisconsin, though, so my political thoughts for the moment went more to former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan. I don't know if he ever flew on this plane, but he lived in Janesville, so he definitely flew into this airport.

Paul Ryan comes from a different era of Republican politics, when they wanted to wreck the country within the confines of the Constitution instead of outside it. This was back when all the Republicans I knew -- people like my aunt and uncle or my in-laws -- went on long rants about how Barack Obama broke the Constitutional norms by wearing a tan suit or something. I don't remember what all they went on about. There was a lot, and none of it was any more real than Pizzagate or made any more sense. People wrote 300,000-word screeds full of direct quotes taped off Fox News complaining about how a preacher at a church President Obama went to a few times upset the Constitutional order or something. Now these same people are happily defending the President and his henchman Donald Trump as they just ignore whatever pieces of law they don't like.

Sure, these people say, there's nothing wrong with President Elon chucking an agency created in a 1961 act of Congress and reallocating money Congress budgeted and voted on. No reason to get all hung up on that naggy bit on Constitution in Article I. Separation of Powers doesn't matter! Your fifth-grade civics teacher was wrong!

"Why shouldn't President Elon and his dementia-addled minion save us money?" these people say, ignoring the Constitutional mandate that Congress decides how money gets spent.

"But you weren't whining about it when Democrats were doing it," these people say. But just ask them when a Democratic President just erased an Congressionally-established agency at will. They'd have gone insane if President Obama or President Biden tried one-tenth the stuff President Elon has pulled in the last month.

It's weird. Paul Ryan ran for the vice presidency under Mittens Romney in 2012 and lost, and I think that made them all decide they just didn't care anymore. Nothing else mattered as long as they won. Now, they just ignore all that pesky Constitutional stuff they used to go on about, which tells me they never really cared about it to begin with. Either they don't actually know what's in the Constitution -- and they're proudly uneducated, so that's a distinct possibility -- or they know and are hypocrites who just don't care. I think there's a lot of both.

Anyway, that's a nice airplane. I was thinking Payne Stewart died on a plane like that, but he died on a Lear jet.

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We passed this old drive-in restaurant on the highway between Beloit and Janesville, so I stopped to get a picture while Robin and I debated whether it was still open on a seasonal basis. Robin theorized it was dead, while I said it might be open in the summers. Robin was right.

This spot opened in 1957 as the Golden Point Drive-In, and you can still see a sign reading "The Golden Point" above the front door. This was evidently a Chicago-based chain that eventually expanded to 70-someodd locations in 24 states, and they were all in A-frame buildings like this one. The chain burned out quickly, though, and most of them were closed by the late '60s. This spot was bought out in 1963 and reconstituted itself as the Circus Drive-In, and it lasted all by itself until 2016. It's dead now, though. If I had money, I might buy it and give it a go.

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Rock County is home to the town of Beloit, which is home to Beloit College, a small, private liberal arts college with a student body of around a thousand students. They have a fancier campus than you'd expect for a thousand-student college, but then, they've been here since 1846, so they've had a lot of time to build.

One fun thing I didn't realize when I took this picture is that the Beloit campus is the site of 20 mounds from the mound building cultures of Native Americans that flourished in the Midwest a thousand or so years ago, dating from the years 400 AD to 1200 AD. Three of those mounds are right here in front of me, and I had no idea. There wasn't a sign or anything. I almost climbed up onto one of them to get this picture.

That's not why Beloit College is famous, though. The college is best-known for this annual list they put out for 20 years starting in 1998 that all the newspapers and evening news shows ran filler stories on. They called it the "Mindset List," and it was a list of things that particular year's college freshmen wound never have known or experienced. For instance, the 1998 list, talking about the incoming Class of 2002, had items like "They have likely never played Pac-Man, and have never heard of Pong," and "The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno." The 2025 list talking about the incoming Class of 2029 might have said, "The Tonight Show was never hosted by Jay Leno," only the college stopped putting out the list in 2018 after various academic types denounced the list as "a poorly written compendium of trivia, stereotypes and lazy generalizations, insulting to both students and their professors, and based on nothing more than the uninformed speculation of its authors." Seems a bit priggish to me, but then academic types like getting worked up over dumb stuff when the world's falling apart around them, so it makes sense that they be throwing a fit over it. In just a few years, today's college freshmen will have never known a Beloit College Mindset List.

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We killed a Saturday a couple of weekends ago with a random drive to Wisconsin so I could take a picture in Rock County. I've passed through Rock County probably three dozens times -- it's the county where I-90 enters the state on its way to Madison -- but for some reason, I never posted a pictures from there. Fortunately, if you travel into the state and county along US 51 instead of the interstate, there's a big fiberglass cow outside a fireworks shop to welcome you.

According to that sign, this cow is named Clarabelle, and if I posted this picture to Facebook and tagged this store, I could get a free gift. I think I'd have had to have made Robin take a picture of me with the cow, though, and she didn't want to get out of the car because it was cold.

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